Infused Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Skills in Oral Communication Tasks

This study aimed to identify the social-emotional learning skills infused in the oral communication tasks utilized in a Chinese Senior High school in Baguio City, Philippines. Through the use of qualitative descriptive research design and the rigorous process of document analysis, the researcher found out that the activities, tasks, and the whole curriculum in oral communication of the selected locale of the study highlight responsible decision-making to be the most evident hence prioritized SEL skill being developed in the said subject followed by relationship skills, social awareness, self-management, and self-awareness respectively based on the frequency of occurrences of these in said activities. Thus, it can be agreed based on the result that responsible decision-making has been focused predominantly on the activities used to develop skills concerning problem-solving and analyzing which are essential for students to be competitive in the 21st century. It can also be deducted that the curriculum of the said locale of the study should further include other SEL skills primarily highlighting social awareness and relationship skills, as they were perceived to be essential in oral communication. Keywords: Social-Emotional Learning (SEL); responsible decision-making; oral communication; social awareness; relationship skills

The Impacts of Taklimakan Dust Events on Chinese Urban Air Quality in 2015

Aerosols are an important factor affecting air quality. As the largest source of dust aerosol of East Asia, the Taklimakan Desert in Northwest China witnesses frequent dust storm events, which bring about significant impacts on the downstream air quality. However, the scope and timing of the impacts of Taklimakan dust events on Chinese urban air quality have not yet been fully investigated. In this paper, based on multi-source dust data including ground observations, satellite monitoring, and reanalysis products, as well as air quality index (AQI) and the mass concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 at 367 urban stations in China for 2015, we examined the temporal and spatial characteristics of the impacts of the Taklimakan dust events on downstream urban air quality in China. The results show that the Taklimakan dust events severely affected the air quality of most cities in Northwest China including eastern Xinjiang, Hexi Corridor and Guanzhong Basin, and even northern Southwest China, leading to significant increases in mass concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 in these cities correlating with the occurrence of dust events. The mass concentrations of PM10 on dust days increased by 11–173% compared with the non-dust days, while the mass concentration of PM2.5 increased by 21–172%. The increments of the mass concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 on dust days decreased as the distances increased between the cities and the Taklimakan Desert. The influence of the Taklimakan dust events on the air quality in the downstream cities usually persisted for up to four days. The mass concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 increased successively and the impact duration shortened gradually with increasing distances to the source area as a strong dust storm progressed toward the southeast from the Taklimakan Desert. The peaks of the PM10 concentrations in the downstream cities of eastern Xinjiang, the Hexi Corridor and the Guanzhong Basin occurred on the second, third and fourth days, respectively, after the initiation of the Taklimakan dust storm

Why patients switch help from online to offline: An empirical investigation of emotions and effects of cognitions

People have different reactions when they encounter different levels of health threats. Individual cognitions towards the seriousness of health threat and emotions arise from health threats often motivate people to seek help online and offline. To examine the effects of cognitions and emotions on help seeking behaviors on different levels of health threats, we propose a research model based on protection motivation theory and cognition-emotion-behavior framework. Empirical data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed by Smart PLS. The results show that perceived susceptibility and perceived severity have positive significant influence on fear which leads on anxiety. Perceived health knowledge has negative influence on anxiety. Fear and anxiety can motivate individuals to seek help online and offline, especially in the high health threats condition. In addition, fear has significant influence on help seeking offline while anxiety has significant influence on help seeking online. Expectation confirmation has different effects on help seeking offline in different levels of health threats. This study extends PMT through the lens of cognition-emotion-behavior framework, and it expands research scope to help seeking behaviors

Extracting respiratory signals from thoracic cone beam CT projections

Patient respiratory signal associated with the cone beam CT (CBCT) projections is important for lung cancer radiotherapy. In contrast to monitoring an external surrogate of respiration, such signal can be extracted directly from the CBCT projections. In this paper, we propose a novel local principle component analysis (LPCA) method to extract the respiratory signal by distinguishing the respiration motion-induced content change from the gantry rotation-induced content change in the CBCT projections. The LPCA method is evaluated by comparing with three state-of-the-art projection-based methods, namely, the Amsterdam Shroud (AS) method, the intensity analysis (IA) method, and the Fourier-transform based phase analysis (FT-p) method. The clinical CBCT projection data of eight patients, acquired under various clinical scenarios, were used to investigate the performance of each method. We found that the proposed LPCA method has demonstrated the best overall performance for cases tested and thus is a promising technique for extracting respiratory signal. We also identified the applicability of each existing method.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Phys. Med. Bio

A patient-specific lumped-parameter model of coronary circulation

A new lumped-parameter model for coronary hemodynamics is developed. This model is developed for the whole coronary network based on CT scans of a patient-specific geometry including the right coronary tree, which is absent in many previous mathematical models. The model adopts the structured tree model boundary conditions similar to the work of Olufsen et al., thus avoiding the necessity of invasive perfusion measurements. In addition, we also incorporated the effects of the head loss at the two inlets of the large coronary arteries for the first time. The head loss could explain the phenomenon of a sudden increase of the resistance at the inlet of coronary vessel. The estimated blood pressure and flow rate results from the model agree well with the clinical measurements. The computed impedances also match the experimental perfusion measurement. The effects of coronary arterial stenosis are considered and the fractional flow reserve and relative flow in the coronary vessels for a stenotic vessel computed in this model show good agreement with published experimental data. It is believed that the approach could be readily translated to clinical practice to facilitate real time clinical diagnosis